Impact Crater of the Australasian Tektites, Southern Laos

Abstract:

The Australasian strewn field, a horizon of glassy clasts formed of molten ejecta from the impact of a bolide about 770,000 years ago, covers about a tenth of the Earth – from Indochina to Australia and from the Indian to western Pacific oceans. The distribution of chemical and physical characteristics of these tektites implies a very large impact somewhere in central Indochina. A half-century of unsuccessful searching for the impact crater implies obscuration by either erosion or burial.

Geomorphological and stratigraphic evidence suggests that the crater lies buried beneath lavas and cinder cones of a 100-km wide volcanic shield centered atop the Bolaven Plateau of southern Laos. One critical test of this hypothesis, using precise ⁴⁰Ar/³⁹Ar dating, is now in progress – are these highly weathered basalts younger than the tektites? Although volcanic rocks cover most of the area proximal to our purported impact site, a thick, crudely bedded, bouldery to pebbly breccia that crops out southeast of the obscured crater rim appears to be part of an ejecta blanket. The basal unit of this fining-upward sequence comprises large boulders of late-Mesozoic sandstone bedrock that display in situ shattering. This implies emplacement ballistically rather than by debris-flow.

Old surfaces in the surrounding region (as others have noted) and on the Plateau have a mantle of pebbly, detrital lateritic debris that in its upper 15 cm contains angular tektite fragments. We hypothesize that this debris is a proximal fall bed produced by shock-induced comminution and ejection of a lateritic soil that covered the Plateau bedrock. Deposition was nearly complete when sparse tektite fragments ejected from nearer the center of the impact began to land. At many sites this pebbly, lateritic bed is overlain by a thick silty bed that others have associated with aeolian erosion of a barren, incinerated tropical landscape. See Herrin et al (this meeting) for more on the volcanic rocks.